Lyon, Barbara

ORAL HISTORY OF BARBARA LYON
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
July 22, 2004
[Side A]
[Editor’s note: Recording begins mid-conversation.]
Mrs. Lyon: I was pregnant, and I was expecting a baby in the next month or two, and I didn’t know how you had a baby without a phone or a car. But then I was walking around the house and I found a phone pole down by the road that had a red box on it that said Emergency, and I opened the box and there was a phone, so I thought that’s what we’ll do. What I didn’t take into account was the neighbors. Neighbors were your society then. Without cars, you couldn’t do anything.
Mr. Kolb: You had a network.
Mrs. Lyon: Except, yeah, except the neighborhood, and we had many street parties.
Mr. Kolb: Who were your first neighbors?
Mrs. Lyon: Our first neighbors were the Templetons. He was an engineer, and I don’t know what it was he did. As soon as the war was over, he moved to a franchise in Texas.
Mr. Kolb: Well you weren’t supposed to know what people did, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Well that’s true, that’s true. And his wife was Ruby May, and she was a Memphis belle, and we always thought of her as ‘Ruby May, the Memphis Belle.’ Shortly after I got home from the hospital with the new baby, Ruby May came running over and said, come quick, Ken is stuck in the mud. Ken was my son, two years old. I ran over. I was still kind of rocky. I was about, I was about ten days out of parturition, and there was a great arroyo between her house and the house beyond, which had been washed out by a flash flood, tree roots and rocks were all along the side of it, and way down at the bottom was this little boy, standing there with both of his feet disappeared.
Mr. Kolb: In the mud.
Mrs. Lyon: In the mud.
Mr. Kolb: Having fun.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, he was wondering what to do. He was standing there kind of puzzled. Fortunately, he didn’t panic. If he’d panicked and fallen on his face, he probably would have disappeared.
Mr. Kolb: Now, he was only two years old?
Mrs. Lyon: Two. He was two. And so, how he got out of the house, I don’t know that. I should have known. But I walked, I got down to the bottom of the arroyo, holding onto the rocks and roots and grabbed him by the waist and dug down to get his feet out of the mud, and we sacrificed one shoe, and Ruby May stood at the edge and said, “I just hate mud!” Well, we all did.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that was just one of many muddy experiences.
Mrs. Lyon: The other hardship of early life there was the famine.
Mr. Kolb: Famine?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, we had, we were on rationing, of course, but in addition to the rationing, there were shortages. We couldn’t spend our stamps. There was no meat. The retailers, who were called ‘concessionaires’ at that time, did not know how much stock to order, because the population of the town was a secret. The Army, of course, had everything, and in the hospital I had meat three times a day, but we had meat once a week if we were lucky after I got out, and we used to go on meat forages outside the reservation.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, to the farmers, you mean?
Mrs. Lyon: To farmers, yeah, people who might be able to sell us meat, eggs. We had milk delivered to the porch, but you had to stand in line. You had to get on a list to get to Norris Dairy, because they had Jersey cows, and they had more cream in the milk.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, yeah, richer, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s one thing, you saw the cream on the top, not separated –
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, yes, that’s right, and that was our source of cream. There were times when I had not one gram of fat in the house, not any kind of fat at all, and I experienced, what I have read about since, which is fat hunger. Apparently if you go a long time without any fat at all, you can’t think of anything else.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness. We don’t have that problem anymore. That’s the opposite problem, the opposite problem [laughter].
Mrs. Lyon: So, let’s see, what else?
Mr. Kolb: So you were used to standing in line, of course, for whatever.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, cigarettes were hard to find. I had a stroller that I had brought from Chicago that was all wood, because we couldn’t use anything metal. Everything metal was turned in. And it had wooden wheels, and we had boardwalks instead of sidewalks. And the boardwalks went through the forest in the back of the house. And the way to get downtown was to take a boardwalk, and I could take it to Cedar Hill and catch a bus, but not with the stroller. So if I went downtown – this was before Rick was born – if I went downtown with Ken, I had to walk all the way with the stroller.
Mr. Kolb: Now, did that work on the boardwalk, the stroller?
Mrs. Lyon: Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, they were wooden wheels, no springs, wooden wheels, solid wood wheels.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, wooden wheels on a wooden boardwalk.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s a rough ride.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, well, Ken enjoyed it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, I guess so. I’m glad he did.
Mrs. Lyon: But –
Mr. Kolb: Now, how long – you say you didn’t have a car.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, we didn’t have a car until, let’s see, Rick was born in ’45, the war was over that fall –
Mr. Kolb: Right, August.
Mrs. Lyon: And Rick was, I think, two before we got a car. We got a second-hand car.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so Dick had to take the bus to work?
Mrs. Lyon: At first, the bus came straight to the house and picked him up at the house. Then later, he was let off at Cedar Hill by a bus, and he walked up from there. And as long as he was taking the bus, it was great, because he was home at five o’clock, and I knew when he would be coming in.
Mr. Kolb: Let me ask, just to diverge a little bit, what was his job down here? Did he work at the Graphite Reactor by chance?
Mrs. Lyon: He had a loop, a NaK loop.
Mr. Kolb: A NaK loop.
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn, sodium potassium loop. They had a fireman sitting outside his lab all the time. He was – I don’t know, what do you do with a loop?
Mr. Kolb: Well, was it an irradiation experiment?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: So it was at the Graphite Reactor, had to have been.
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe so.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the only reactor we have there.
Mrs. Lyon: I never went to work with him.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it had to have been there.
Mrs. Lyon: And he never said “Graphite Reactor” to me.
Mr. Kolb: Probably, probably working on an irradiation experiment with some metal, something of that nature.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: With NaK, because that became a big research project later on.
Mrs. Lyon: It did?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and he was an expert on NaK technology, yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: He edited the Liquid Metals Handbook.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, I mean, he was a liquid metals person all his life. It was his field, yeah. I didn’t know he started that early, or even that that program started that early, because that’s pretty early. ’45 is pretty early.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I believe he was a group leader.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, so he worked at X-10.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, always worked at X-10.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Okay, I’m sorry, but anyway, back to the living conditions. The muddy streets were a mess. Of course, you had to deal with not having a car, and all the rationing, so did you shop much outside of Oak Ridge besides these farms? Did you go into Knoxville and Clinton?
Mrs. Lyon: We weren’t making a great deal of money.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have much to spend.
Mrs. Lyon: In addition to the rationing – well, Stoke’s father, who knew –
Mr. Kolb: Whose father?
Mrs. Lyon: Dick’s father, who knew Arthur Holly Compton, also knew Oscar Mayer. Stoke’s – Dick’s father was Chief Executive Officer of the Association of Commerce in Chicago, and as such, he knew a lot of leaders in Chicago, and one of them was Oscar Mayer, and Oscar Mayer-
Mr. Kolb: Of the meat?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, Oscar himself, and when Dick’s father told him that we were in Tennessee without any meat, he said, “Well, are they using up their stamps?” And he said, “I don’t think so.” We threw away red stamps. Well, he said, “Tell them to send me all of their red stamps, and I’ll send them the meat.” So once a month, we got an Oscar Mayer delivery of a pound of wieners, a link of liver sausage – this really isn’t interesting, because it isn’t typical of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: It’s wonderful, because it is so atypical. That’s what’s great about it, I mean, what you do to survive.
Mrs. Lyon: And a pound of bacon, and a nugget of boneless ham.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. And how long did that go on? Till after the war?
Mrs. Lyon: Until rationing stopped.
Mr. Kolb: And when was that? I’ve forgotten.
Mrs. Lyon: That was the end of the war.
Mr. Kolb: I guess that was the end of the war. I experienced that too.
Mrs. Lyon: We didn’t want rationing to stop, because we felt that it would mean that there would be no limit to costs. But it stopped, and there was an inflation. But eventually our salaries adjusted.
Mr. Kolb: Did your special treatment of this meat delivery cause any problem with your neighbors or did – people that knew you?
Mrs. Lyon: I shared it with them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I was going to say, because they had the same problem you did. They were short of meat.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, that’s right, that’s right. I had a way of making –
Mr. Kolb: You could have a meat party every once in a while, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I used to get a loaf of rye bread, and I would take a piece of bacon, one piece of bacon and cut it in half, and I would put cheese between the two pieces of bread, and I would put the bacon on the outside, and I would fry it, and it made a very nice bacon cheese sandwich.
Mr. Kolb: Talk about stretching the bacon, half a piece.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, oh, yeah, we would often have just one piece of bacon.
Mr. Kolb: Just the essence of bacon.
Mrs. Lyon: I knew how to make a whole casserole with one strip of bacon. But one time during a very hot summer, the package arrived, and I took it out to my U-shaped kitchen, and opened it up eagerly, and it was filled with maggots.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no. Oh, goodness, it sat too long in some post office, was ruined.
Mrs. Lyon: And the problem was that it was between me and the living room. It took a lot of courage to even walk past that. [laughter]
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I guess so, ooh. [laughter]
Mrs. Lyon: Well, anyway.
Mr. Kolb: That only happened one time? That the meat spoiled?
Mrs. Lyon: Just once.
Mr. Kolb: I guess there was no such thing as, well, expedited delivery back then.
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: With wartime, everything else took precedence. Well, that’s a unique story. I’ve never heard that before, and I never knew about fat deprivation.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, fat deprivation is –
Mr. Kolb: I mean, we just don’t have that problem anymore, haven’t had that in a long time.
Mrs. Lyon: – really serious. They learned about it in Germany after WWI.
Mr. Kolb: Physically, what did it cause you? Could you not sleep at night?
Mrs. Lyon: You just couldn’t think of anything else.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it kind of made you distracted.
Mrs. Lyon: It was just the hunger.
Mr. Kolb: Your body just was not normal.
Mrs. Lyon: Nothing tasted good.
Mr. Kolb: That’s so far from our present experience that we don’t even think about it.
Mrs. Lyon: I know it, I know it.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that.
Mrs. Lyon: I’ve had such an interesting life.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I bet you have. That’s what we’re going to talk about.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I mean, I started out in the twenties – well, you don’t want to hear this.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, go back. That’s fine, go ahead.
Mrs. Lyon: In the twenties –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you were from Michigan, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, my father owned a newspaper, and we were prosperous in the twenties. We had a chauffeur, we had a maid, we had a cleaning woman, and then the Depression came and somehow or other, I felt that it was my fault.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no, for goodness sakes.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I got called on so many times for wasting money, buying something that cost too much or something.
Mr. Kolb: Well, was this as a teenager?
Mrs. Lyon: By my parents. I was born in ’18, so I was twelve in ’30, and so I went through the Depression in my teens, and I got reamed out for buying things, so I thought, well this is why we’re poor, because –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, ruining the country.
Mrs. Lyon: Then I went away to college and then I lived through the War and then I lived through the nuclear science era and the Cold War. It’s just been a very good life, very exciting.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard other Oak Ridgers – well, the fact that you were in Oak Ridge made it even more unique than just the fact – I mean, everyone was going through the same thing, but being in Oak Ridge made it, I don’t know, what’s the magnification factor, times three, or – in terms of interest?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s true, because the people in Oak Ridge are –
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Ridge experience was unique, right?
Mrs. Lyon: – are the kind of people you can’t live without. And you go to try another town – over and over people left Oak Ridge after the War and came back because the towns were so uninteresting.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I never have heard that.
Mrs. Lyon: Stoke said that working with nuclear was intoxicating, and you just couldn’t live without it once you’ve tried it. Everything else was dull. His boss, Winter, Charlie Winter, left to go back to, was it Oklahoma or Texas, anyway he was into oil.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he was with Union Carbide, he was high up in Union Carbide.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and he went back to work with oil, and it was no good. He came back here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I worked on the HRT, and he would come over while we were operating the HRT, and he had to see what was going on.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In fact they even kidded about making a special control panel that was not real so he could fiddle some knobs, and deal with something, so that he wouldn’t come up and do something on the control panel that would mess up the reactor operation.
Mrs. Lyon: How funny, how funny.
Mr. Kolb: because he wanted to come in and do something –
Mrs. Lyon: I know.
Mr. Kolb: – with his hands, you know. What does this do, and what is this doing? We never did it, but we made a joke about it.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, well that was, that was Dick’s boss.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that, I never heard anyone say what you said about your husband’s experience, but nuclear energy research was really exciting. It was. There’s no doubt about it.
Mrs. Lyon: “We were spoiled,” he said, “Once you’d worked with it, everything else was dull.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, let me ask you this then, because there’s a follow under that: when nuclear, in the seventies or eighties, got into trouble in terms of being accepted – nuclear energy, not atomic bombs, but nuclear energy – how did he react to that? I mean, somebody that’s dedicated their life to one field, and that’s nuclear energy, and to have it not accepted, how did he deal with that?
Mrs. Lyon: He didn’t take it personally. His reaction was that of so many people at the laboratory, E. P. Epler, Alvin Weinberg, all the old nukes, knew that it offered a solution to problems that the world would be facing in the future, and that attention to it should be continued. Myron Cherry was the lawyer, you know, who – I don’t know – a lot of people had to go and testify in court, and they came back almost broken because they had been slapped around by lawyers, and Myron Cherry was the chief one. The difference, of course, was the question would be, “Are you sure that this is no problem?” And no scientist will say he is sure, you know. They were looking for the truth, and the lawyers were looking to win.
Mr. Kolb: Looking for an excuse.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, they were –
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’m sorry.
Mrs. Lyon: I can’t think of the word. They were promoting it, promoting their side.
Mr. Kolb: Right, now was this hearings about power plant licensing?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, licensing, and there was the famous cow at the fence around the nuclear reactor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, hypothetical dose. Yeah, right. How much irradiation would it get after a major accident, yeah, if you drink its milk, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because I was involved in that too. But in other words, he handled it assuming that eventually nuclear power would come back.
Mrs. Lyon: He knew it would.
Mr. Kolb: So he was optimistic.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well, that’s good. But it was tough.
Mrs. Lyon: Frederick said he came back from testifying at one of these hearings, and he said after the lawyer was through with him, he really thought he was going to have a heart attack.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he was so upset?
Mrs. Lyon: The stress was so awful.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, I’m going to stop a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, about living conditions, there’s another kind of interesting event that, or situation, the fact that this was a dry county, and you could not get liquor legally. Of course, you could get it illegally. How did that affect you? I mean, do you have any involvement, any remembrances about that?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, whenever we went north or to Chattanooga, we picked up what we needed, until it became legal here, and then we, when we came back from the north, we bought bread, because you couldn’t get good bread in the south.
Mr. Kolb: I see. But how did you get it past the guards in the wartime? Did you smuggle it in?
Mrs. Lyon: We didn’t have liquor during the wartime. I don’t know what we did for liquor. There was apparently some kind of deal in Kentucky with a brewery, and we used to get two-point-three beer.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, cheap beer, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, something-Falls.
Mr. Kolb: Well, as I understand it, there was liquor available.
Mrs. Lyon: There was, and I’m trying to think how we got it. I think we smuggled it in probably.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a lot of people did.
Mrs. Lyon: There is the famous story about the people who came in and had their liquor confiscated and later were invited to a party at the Nichols’ and found their own liquor on the sideboard.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, didn’t throw it away in other words.
Mrs. Lyon: Certainly not, certainly not.
Mr. Kolb: They kept it. Yeah, when there was parties for important people, they had liquor.
Mrs. Lyon: And friendships were made and broken by trips to Chattanooga and Oakdale, if you didn’t ask a friend to go with you.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness, you said ‘broken.’
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, or tell them that you were going so you could bring back something for them. There was a lot of bitterness about that.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: What did you say about Mr. Weinberg once?
Mrs. Lyon: Mr. Weinberg got off the plane, from coming down from Washington, and a man who was meeting him said, “Mr. Weinberg, your briefcase is leaking.”
Mr. Kolb: Was it really?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, he took the briefcase for one purpose and one purpose only.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Well they had special briefcases back then, large, with padding.
Mrs. Lyon: Sure, and the central liquor store in Washington, if you went to it, they would say, “How is Mr. Weinberg?”
Mr. Kolb: One of their main customers, yeah, of course. So you went around, you got –
Mrs. Lyon: Cigarettes were a problem too, cigarettes, and then after the war was over, the tax on cigarettes was so heavy, we used to go to North Carolina and bring in cartons of cigarettes.
Mr. Kolb: At least that was legal; it wasn’t illegal.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: It was expensive. But that takes us to the question of dealing with the locals. I assume you went shopping in Knoxville some. How were you treated by the locals?
Mrs. Lyon: The Knoxville police force was the enemy of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Really. Really!
Mrs. Lyon: A man was seized by the city police when he stumbled stepping off a curb. He was taken into custody for public drunkenness and held incommunicado. He could not make a phone call. Another time, a girl was going to college and belonged to the International Group there. The International Group had a party. The police raided it, found the girl dancing with somebody of a different race, put her in the car and quizzed her with sexual questions all night long. She was hysterical by the time they let go of her.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they didn’t arrest her, they just harassed her.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. The stories of the Knoxville police were just horrendous.
Mr. Kolb: I never have heard that before. So they singled out Oak Ridgers, kind of?
Mrs. Lyon: I stopped taking the News Sentinel because its columnists were so hostile about Oak Ridge and started taking the Chattanooga Times instead.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well about the other retail people, I mean, when you went shopping, did they –
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, they didn’t mind, as long as we had money.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good money, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But I used to drive into Knoxville with the babies in the back seat, and they would fall asleep driving in, but the minute I hit the Knoxville city limits, the streets were not paved, and we’d go bump, bump, bump, and they’d wake up. They had no gutters, and their streets were not paved. Really, Oak Ridge made Knoxville. Oak Ridge and TVA.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, I’m thinking about your question there.
Mrs. Lyon: It was –
Mr. Kolb: Of course, they would say TVA, but yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: It was the asshole of the world.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s now on record, isn’t it?
Mr. Kolb: That’s right, that’s fine. We’ll put it in quotes.
Mrs. Lyon: I had a black woman who came to me when Rick was born, and she came every day on the bus, and she took care of me and took care of Rick, and she was the oldest of twelve children of a Civil War veteran. She didn’t know which side of the Civil War he fought on. She called it the “Silver War.” Well, she wasn’t comic; she was just a marvelous person. I learned so much from her in the way of patience. She had relatives who were in the graveyards up on Orchard Lane.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so she was a local person?
Mrs. Lyon: She had grown up in Clinton and had been trained by Mrs. Cross at the age of twelve, and she’d been in service since that age. And she used to bathe Rick in front of the oven. She’d turn on the oven, and she’d sit in a chair and –
Mr. Kolb: To keep him warm, you mean?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and bathe him. Well, the heat problem was pretty bad. Each cemesto was heated by a soft coal furnace, and if we didn’t bank it properly at night, the temperature was forty in the house the next morning when you got up, and you had to start a new fire with kindling, which you didn’t always have.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a cold morning.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and the furnace was in the furnace room, where there was the coal bin, and the coal bin was refilled regularly by men who parked out in front and carried it up on their backs and dumped it in the door.
Mr. Kolb: Dirty job.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, yeah, and it made the house dirty too.
Mr. Kolb: Soot, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, the ceilings were all streaked with soot. It was a housekeeping challenge.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll bet, yes, right, between that and the mud, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a good experience with this housekeeper person.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, but she told me a lot. The Crosses had a, the Crosses were the rich people in Clinton, and they had a summer house where Grove Center is now, and they bathed in the spring, which was down where the swimming pool is now. And the swimming pool was settled there because of the spring. And their house was turned into a veterans’ house. Remember that house, next to the theater?
Mr. Kolb: A veterans’ house? I didn’t remember that.
Mrs. Lyon: It was VFW.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in Grove Center.
Mrs. Lyon: In Grove Center, next to the theater.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, VFW, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: It was an old Victorian house. That was the Crosses’ summer home. And every summer, Casina – I said, “That’s an interesting name, Casina.”
Mr. Kolb: What was her last name?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, I can’t think, oh, why do I forget that? She was such an important part of our family.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s okay, just don’t worry about it.
Mrs. Lyon: Casina [McSwain] – I asked her, and she said, “My daddy read books.”
Mr. Kolb: Which was probably pretty rare.
Mrs. Lyon: He was much, much older than her mother. And I think her mother was his second wife.
Mr. Kolb: So she was an intelligent person, this Casina, right?
Mrs. Lyon: She was not educated, but she knew a great deal.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and her parents were above average, you might say, intellectually, you think?
Mrs. Lyon: No, her father was.
Mr. Kolb: Her father, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: Her mother wasn’t. She had a daughter who was retarded, I think, and I was able to steer her onto social security assistance for her daughter. Her daughter was old enough to work, but she couldn’t work, so she got some assistance there.
Mr. Kolb: How long did she work for you, do you remember?
Mrs. Lyon: Till she died.
Mr. Kolb: Till she died! That was quite a while, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: She died in ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, she worked all that time? She started during the war years?
Mrs. Lyon: ’69, ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s over twenty years, right? Wow.
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe it was. Let’s see, when did Marge Weinberg die?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know.
Mrs. Lyon: I think that was ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it sounds about right, yeah. So you had a good relationship, a long relationship with this woman.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. She was very dear to all of us. As a matter of fact, recently when Rick’s wife became pregnant, he said, “If it’s a girl, we’re going to call her Casina.”
Mr. Kolb: Good. I’ll be darned. Well, that, I mean, that was a rare –
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I felt enriched by her.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that���s interesting, yeah. There weren’t a lot of Afro-Americans here at the time.
Mrs. Lyon: No, there weren’t, it was not –
Mr. Kolb: As I understand it. Now some were brought in, of course, to work.
Mrs. Lyon: She was on the list of the hospital, social office, social services office, for taking care of women who were taking a baby home, and that was how I got her at first.
Mr. Kolb: I see, so you were fortunate, then.
Mrs. Lyon: We’ve used up the tape, haven’t we.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, it’s okay. I’m just looking. Well that’s another unique experience that you’ve had. There are other people that have had that kind of interaction, but not with this quality of a person.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, well that’s a very wonderful relationship you’ve described there. Let’s go on, unless you want to say anything more about that.
Mrs. Lyon: I can’t remember much more.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, did you have any other interaction with black people?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, yes, of course we had a black councilman.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and that was – I forget his name. I should know it.
Mrs. Lyon: I forget it too.
Mr. Kolb: He’s passed away now.
Mrs. Lyon: I was, I was very –
Mr. Kolb: But this was after the war.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. You want the war. No, I found that I got much better service at stores – I learned to talk Tennessee.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, put a twang on your voice, huhn?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. The woman who lived across the street from me was a local person and she was very sweet. One time, Marge Weinberg was over at my house and I got to talking to Mrs. Carpenter, and Marge said, “Where’d you get the southern accent?” I hadn’t even realized I was doing that.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. So it got to be second nature to you kind of?
Mrs. Lyon: No, it’s just that I – I just guess I echoed their accent.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, you know Cas Walker had that trait. He could speak the most common, you know, vernacular, and he could speak the King’s English.
Mrs. Lyon: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Yes, that’s right. I’ve actually experienced that.
Mrs. Lyon: He wasn’t the good old boy.
Mr. Kolb: Well, he was both. He turned it on and off as the situation –
Mrs. Lyon: Do you remember Bert Vincent? Bert Vincent, the columnist, in the News Sentinel?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I do, now you mention it, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, we were taking the News Sentinel when we first came here, and I read Bert Vincent, and I just could not believe him. I used to cut out his column and send it to my friends up north. First thing I heard him say was, the story is that on New Year’s Day, you should eat field peas –
Mr. Kolb: Black eyed peas.
Mrs. Lyon: – and sow belly.
Mr. Kolb: And hog jaw.
Mrs. Lyon: Sow belly and field peas. Well, I knew what sow belly was, because I had seen it, live, and I knew what road apples were, but I didn’t know what field peas were. And he said, if you don’t, they say your head will beal.
Mr. Kolb: Will what?
Mrs. Lyon: B-E-A-L.
Mr. Kolb: Beal, that’s a new one. What does that mean?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, the thought of eating them made my head beal, and the thought of eating them with a hangover was just incredible. It was just a whole new world to me. I couldn’t wait to share that one.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever figure out what ‘beal’ means?
Mrs. Lyon: No, I don’t know. And another thing he said was, a friend of his let his chickens roost on the foot of his bed. He said, “I didn’t ask him which way they faced.”
Mr. Kolb: Good, we don’t want to know. Oh, Lord. Well, more interesting things. Let’s move on. I’m going to turn the tape over right now.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, let’s talk a little bit about early Oak Ridge’s entertainment situation in the wartime days. I’m sure you were involved in some kind of entertainment that was going on.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, of course, up to my ears. The Army provided something called Art – Sports and Recreation, I think it was called.
Mr. Kolb: The Army did this?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, Roane Anderson did, and they had a chess club and they had a bridge club, and it was all down there on Broadway in Jackson Square, across from the Guest House. But also, there was a lot of participatory arts. There were a lot of people who played musical instruments, and Waldo Cohn got them all together, and we eventually had a symphony orchestra that we went to hear. There was an Art Center that the people started up, there was the Playhouse that Marshall Lockhart and her friends started up, and we all contributed to it. We all went down and offered our services and it was all voluntary, and that was our social life.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a favorite among those?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I never was able to play a musical instrument well enough to be in that group, and I was not artistic, but I did get involved with the Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: Did you write, involved with writing some of the plays with, at some point in time, but way back there?
Mrs. Lyon: No, that’s Marshall, she did that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and Betty Osborne, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: And Betty Osborne, yes. I was on the board and I was employed by the Playhouse for a while, in the box office.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were? Oh, okay, I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and I was in some plays and I worked lights. I was involved heavily with the Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: So the Playhouse was your thing.
Mrs. Lyon: That was my playground, and Stoke also was in it – Dick – was also in it.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked with Paul Ebert, I guess, a lot.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: When did he come to Oak Ridge? Was it after the war?
Mrs. Lyon: It was after the war. I guess it was about 1950.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, because he was here when I came in ’54. Okay, so there was a lot of – and those were unique organizations for a town like, you know.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, but before we had a car, we had street parties. There were a lot of neighborhoods where people knew each other. Dottie probably told you about that. She lived off Kentucky.
Mr. Kolb: What were the occasions for these parties? Just Saturday night?
Mrs. Lyon: No occasion.
Mr. Kolb: Just Saturday night?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, sure. If we had some liquor, we’d have a party.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, all right, if somebody came back from D.C. with a load.
Mrs. Lyon: But Joe Miller and the Cohns and Dottie Silverman, and some other people all lived on, I think, Kelvin Lane. It was off Kentucky. And they would have a street party, and the whole street would – we’d pull a record player or a radio or something out – stereo out onto the street, and we’d dance. And it was great, and everybody brought food, and everybody brought what they had for liquor. That was our social life.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of spontaneous.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, and when I told you I didn’t know how to have a baby without a phone and a car – what you do is you call on your neighbors. By then we knew our neighbors. So when I was in labor with Rick, I just called Templeton next door, and he drove me down to the hospital.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. You were lucky to have a neighbor with a car.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And he was home at the time. Came in very handy, at the very least. And I’m sure you made some very firm friendships with those parties.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, the friends that I made in Oak Ridge are treasures, just treasures.
Mr. Kolb: Even though people left, in some cases.
Mrs. Lyon: And they’re dying now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s true, that’s right. Being married, you weren’t into the single dating situation like a lot of people were in Oak Ridge, but there was an awful lot of that going on, of course.
Mrs. Lyon: Many of the local girls who came and worked in the Y-12 cubicles, pushing buttons, not knowing what they were doing, came here because of the men, and ended up here because of the men.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Grady Whitman’s wife was one of those.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, Al Rom’s wife was one of those.
Mr. Kolb: There are a lot of them. And they did better than the engineers, because they didn’t fiddle around like some of the engineers would, but they said they found out. What about outside of Oak Ridge, like going to state parks and the Smokies, and that sort of thing? Did you do much of that? Of course, having a baby kind of tied you down.
Mrs. Lyon: Not in the early days, no. But I got to know the Smokies when I was working because I was in charge of a lot of the wives’ programs. But that was later on. I can’t remember going down to Gatlinburg much. Well, of course, we didn’t have a car, and we didn’t have time.
Mr. Kolb: Having two young children kind of became your focal point. Well, let’s move on then to talk about – what was it like living in this “Secret City,” where nobody was supposed to know what anybody else was doing, and keeping a secret? I don’t know whether you knew what Dick was doing or not, or why he was doing it – and living in a guarded town.
Mrs. Lyon: My husband was very conscientious about not revealing one iota about his work. I remember being with a group of women, and one of them said, “Well, everybody knows what they’re doing. It’s the uranium bomb with the cyclotron.” And Stoke came home, and I said, “This woman said this. What does that mean?” He said, “Who was it said it?” Within a week they were in Alaska.
Mr. Kolb: They were moved out?
Mrs. Lyon: They were moved to Alaska!
Mr. Kolb: Wow, that was quick.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s how clever they were at keeping the secret. And it really was a kept secret.
Mr. Kolb: So this was a wife that told this?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, a wife.
Mr. Kolb: And so her husband made the mistake of telling his wife, and then the wife passed it along.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So he lost his job here.
Mrs. Lyon: And one of the people – that wasn’t here, that was in Chicago – and one of the categories that the security men were warned against was ‘bridge-playing women.’
Mr. Kolb: Who talk! [laughter]
Mrs. Lyon: I was not a ‘bridge-playing woman.’
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay. Did you know about the Army intelligence people being infiltrated in everything at the plants?
Mrs. Lyon: Not until after the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t realize that they were there?
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: But they were. I mean, you know about that, yeah, they were, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Apparently.
Mr. Kolb: They were snooping, in other words.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, no, I wasn’t aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: And they even snooped in town.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know it, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: No, I wasn’t aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: But in terms of affecting your lifestyle or the way you felt about the town, having this guarded city, where the outsiders couldn’t come in, did you feel protected?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, in a way, it was a great advantage. You couldn’t be dropped in on by people, and there were no surprises. When they opened the gates –
Mr. Kolb: ���49. Were you for or against it then? Opening the gates. They had a referendum as I understand it.
Mrs. Lyon: I was active in the parents club, Cedar Hill Parents Club – this was before PTA – and we had a little project for the kids at the school to make posters telling them how to protect themselves against strangers coming into the – after the gates were open. And we posted them in all the halls of the school.
Mr. Kolb: But do you remember the vote about the opening of the gates, that there was a vote taken?
Mrs. Lyon: No, was there?
Mr. Kolb: It didn’t pass.
Mrs. Lyon: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told, and they went ahead and did it anyway. It was a foregone conclusion that it was going to happen.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, we didn’t exactly live in a democracy.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, it was controlled. Obviously it was controlled by the federal government. But you felt protected, in other words, in your home.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yeah, felt very secure.
Mr. Kolb: Secure, yeah, and that was something that was going to go away.
Mrs. Lyon: Apparently.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, eventually.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. I remember us – we left home one time to go up to Michigan, and we not only left the house unlocked, but we left the front door open.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, oh goodness sakes, oh wow. Did you tell anybody you were going to be gone? I mean, your neighbors?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I’ve never been security minded. Anyway, it didn’t bother me much. But I look back on it and think, what a foolish thing to do.
Mr. Kolb: But did you tell your neighbors you were going to be gone?
Mrs. Lyon: There were, there were three paradoxes that I observed when we first came here. One, because of the type of heat all of the houses had, there was a great deal of fog down on Tennessee, and up where we lived, on the hill, was quite sunny. And conversely, there were some times when there was fog on the hill and sunny down below. That was when the fog was lifting. So the first paradox I found were people driving with their cars with car lights on and dark glasses. Then another paradox was kids going to school in ankle socks and galoshes. That was the mud. And the other thing was Christmas wreaths on screen doors.
Mr. Kolb: On screen doors.
Mrs. Lyon: Because you never took your screen door off.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, those are three good ones. Kind of an oxymoron.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t always, you wouldn’t expect, you didn’t expect. Do you remember, going back to the opening of the gates, do you remember the day that that happened? The big celebration, the parade that occurred? Do you remember that parade?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, and we had a newspaper then. That was the first of the Oak Ridger, and there was a story about it. Back in the early days, every fall we had a fire prevention parade that was participated in by all of the schools, and every school would have its own float. I remember one year that the theme was states of the union, and one school chose Idaho, and all the kids went around in grocery bags. They were potatoes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, potato sacks?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. No, they were grocery bags.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, grocery, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, they were little kids. And the parades always made me cry because there were the little kids and they were so cute. And then when we had the big parade celebrating the opening of the town, the paper said, “A parade is unique to Oak Ridge.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really.
Mrs. Lyon: It was obviously written by strangers.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they didn’t know about the other parade.
Mrs. Lyon: They didn’t know that our only entertainment had been parades.
Mr. Kolb: But it was a good parade?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, Robert Mitchum, terrible looking guy, and somebody was called “The Body.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Marilyn “The Body,” not Monroe, but – and there were several other actors here.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t Alvin Barkley here too?
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe so. It was a tiresome parade.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yeah. We were used to little kids in sacks.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah? Yeah, and there was a big, big celebration, I guess, went on.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was the opening. Well, another big event, the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb that exploded the secretness – where were you and how did your husband and you experience that?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, by then we had a phone and Stoke called me. Somebody told me to turn on the radio, and Stoke called me and said, “Have you heard?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve heard.” And he said, “What did they say?”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you heard it on the radio?
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn. And I said, “They said the town was vaporized.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, talking about Hiroshima.
Mrs. Lyon: And Stoke laughed. For him, I guess it was the achievement of what he’d been working for.
Mr. Kolb: Well, right, yeah, they were the enemy.
Mrs. Lyon: And I cried.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he laughed and you cried. Yeah, that was an interesting reaction. Yeah. There’s nothing glamorous about war, is there.
Mrs. Lyon: And then, Franklin Roosevelt died.
Mr. Kolb: Before that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Before that, yeah. When he died I thought, if Truman becomes President –
Mr. Kolb: Which he would.
Mrs. Lyon: This means that Truman is President, and I felt that we were then going to be ruled by a green grocer. I just thought he was inadequate to the job. And look at him. Nixon turned him into a hero.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, you never know. How did the knowledge of the atomic bomb project – which you had no inkling of, right?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, how did this affect you, that we were involved in this tremendous –
Mrs. Lyon: Well, the end of the war –
Mr. Kolb: After the second bomb.
Mrs. Lyon: After the second bomb and the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission – and who was the Norris man who headed it?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was it David Lilienthal?
Mrs. Lyon: Lilienthal. We all thought a great deal of him. We all thought highly of David Lilienthal. And many of my friends knew his wife; I didn’t. But we felt that it was in good hands. And then we found out that there was a danger of its being turned over to the military. And a large segment of Oak Ridge objected to that strenuously. And that was the first of our big political –
Mr. Kolb: Controversies.
Mrs. Lyon: Controversies and forces, and forces. We had the FANs and the FATs.
Mr. Kolb: The what? The FANs and the FATs?
Mrs. Lyon: The Federal Atomic Workers and the Federation of – what was the FANs? Anyway, both of them launched a great campaign to turn it over to civilian control, and they were successful in that. But that movement started here.
Mr. Kolb: Just in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Lyon: It may have been the whole nuclear community.
Mr. Kolb: Like Los Alamos?
Mrs. Lyon: We weren’t in touch with them, but it was very strong here.
Mr. Kolb: Being the biggest of the three cities, more people were here than Richland or Los Alamos. So, how big did that become? I mean, how many people are we talking about? Thousands or hundreds or what?
Mrs. Lyon: There were intense, intense groups that went to Washington and spoke to our representatives. Then after that, what’s his name – who was the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature? Norman Cousins. Norman Cousins came and talked to us. And he said that this would mark the beginning of a great arms race. And to prevent that, the only thing that would prevent that would be world federation. So up sprung, I don’t know, a dozen groups: Students for World Government, Teachers for World Government, Women for World Government, which I was active in and was the nucleus for the League of Women Voters.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s how League of Women Voters started?
Mrs. Lyon: That was the nucleus group that became the League of Women Voters. At that time, we couldn’t have any registered, we couldn’t have any organizations that were national. We couldn’t have a PTA, for instance, we couldn’t have the League of Women Voters at that time. Something opened up.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what time are we talking, this is just after the war, like ’46 or ’47?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Somewhere in there? Okay.
Mrs. Lyon: I guess it was just before incorporation.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, before incorporation, which was –
Mrs. Lyon: When was incorporation?
Mr. Kolb: Fifty, well, when you built your house, ’56, when the city was sold?
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, incorporation. I’m sorry, I don’t know.
Mrs. Lyon: When the town was incorporated.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t remember.
Mrs. Lyon: Before the town was incorporated, we couldn’t have any national organizations here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see. So it was all locally, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But the movement for world government was intense, and that was in the ’50s.
Mr. Kolb: So this was before the UN was formed?
Mrs. Lyon: That was between ’45 and ’50.
Mr. Kolb: Was this before the UN was formed, then?
Mrs. Lyon: No, it was right after. And there was great hope that the UN would turn into a nucleus for world federation, but, of course, by then the Cold War had started and we got into the arms race.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, Norman Cousins was right. A lot of people were. So off we went. So you were very involved in that particular effort to try to – well, it wasn’t just civilian control – but, of course, the trouble is we didn’t have control over the arms race either. I mean, when the Russians got going, and –
Mrs. Lyon: The charter of the AEC mandated full disclosure of the nature of atomic energy, as it was called then, as wide a dissemination as possible. A speakers bureau was set up – Stoke was a member – and they went out to groups, there was a budget, and they were sent out to groups to talk about the nature of nuclear energy.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, nuclear power? Not the bomb technology, but nuclear power?
Mrs. Lyon: The science – nuclear science. The pros and the cons and the things to be looked out for and the possibilities. I don’t know how long that lasted. That was between ’45 and ’50. But the Cold War put a stop to full disclosure. And when I went to the laboratory, I was on a list – I mean, I was full disclosure – went to the lab in ’66.
Mr. Kolb: And you worked for the ORNL –
Mrs. Lyon: I worked for the Public Information Office.
Mr. Kolb: Review, right? Didn’t you work on The Review?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, The Review was dropped in my lap.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But I was also doing press releases and I was being slapped down, right and left, for full disclosure. Apparently there was a very tight, tight –
Mr. Kolb: Control.
Mrs. Lyon: Control over information.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have much autonomy locally.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, it was information control. So they were very glad when I left.
Mr. Kolb: Well, somebody had to try it, right? Somebody had to do it.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a career, eventually, at the lab, with that public information activity?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good memories out of that too.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh my, yes.
Mr. Kolb: So who else was out – who worked on The Review?
Mrs. Lyon: Sundberg.
Mr. Kolb: Sundberg, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: David Sundberg was brought down from the American Nuclear Society magazine to start The Review. And he found himself so busy with the Information Office that he just dropped it in my lap. And from then on, I had a ball.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked on that exclusively, as a review activity.
Mrs. Lyon: Not exclusively. Eventually I did. In my hands, it was a house organ, and that was its category. I had something in it for everybody at the laboratory, the hourlies, the weeklies, the scientific and technical staff, and Alvin wanted the purpose of it to be – the lab was so big, he wanted each division to know what the other divisions were doing so they could use each other.
Mr. Kolb: So a mechanism for them to reintegrate at the time?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right. It was internal communication. So that was the aim that I pursued. It’s turned into a very sophisticated scientific magazine now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, definitely, right, a lot of effort.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s amazing that that was the only way for them to interact very well.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: You’d think that the division directors would get together purposefully.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, they did, and there was a division directors’ luncheon every month. But this didn’t give them the full knowledge of what they were doing. The Physics Division learned about the Biochemical activities, and the Biologists learned about the Chemistry Division, and they didn’t have that kind of interaction.
Mr. Kolb: Right. I never thought about that being a problem. Although I can understand it. I mean, I always had a problem, or did for a while, with one of my supervisors, and I won’t mention his name, but he thought it was his job to keep us shielded from division news. That would be distractive, and here we were thirsty for what was going on up above, but he was a buffer and thought it was his job to keep us uninformed. You know the old saying, a management style of mushroom management?
Mrs. Lyon: Micromanagement, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Mushroom management.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, mushroom.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, we’re getting close to the end, Barbara, but let me ask: are there any other unique experiences about your early life in Oak Ridge? You’ve talked about a lot of them, but is there anything else you might want to add, just off the top of your head, so to speak, that might be of interest?
Mrs. Lyon: The buses.
Mr. Kolb: Ah, the bus system, there you go, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: The buses at first were very personal and came to your door, because nobody had transportation. Later on, they turned into a more normal bus service, but they stopped at a certain time of the day, nightfall or something, maybe ten o’clock at night. And Stoke and I took a bus down to visit some people, spend the evening with some people on California, where California is between Tennessee and the Turnpike. It was a long way off from 167 Outer Drive. We had a sitter. And when we left, we realized that we were leaving after the buses had stopped working, so we walked home.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, that’s a long way.
Mrs. Lyon: That walk was so memorable. It was a nice mild night. It rained on us a little bit, but at the time, we said, “We ought to do this more often.” We walked all the way up to Outer Drive, all the way along Outer Drive to our house.
Mr. Kolb: It was in the dark?
Mrs. Lyon: The sitter’s mother wouldn’t let her sit with us anymore.
Mr. Kolb: You got home so late.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and there weren’t any street lights. It was in the dark. It was an extraordinary experience, and I’ll never forget it.
Mr. Kolb: Could have been kind of romantic, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: It was, yeah. I guess it must have been three miles, four miles, all uphill.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it must have taken at least an hour, over an hour. The buses – did you ever ride on any of the cattle car buses, so-called?
Mrs. Lyon: Once. I went up to pick up my husband at work, and I took the two kids.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you could do that? You could take the children with you?
Mrs. Lyon: This was not during the war.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, afterwards, I see. But the bus system was still going on.
Mrs. Lyon: The cattle car buses were still going.
Mr. Kolb: So it wasn’t very long after the war.
Mrs. Lyon: The younger boy was walking, so it must have been ’50.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they still had cattle cars going?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, maybe not. Anyway, the car broke down, and somebody gave us a ride up to the Lab, and we waited at the Lab till Stoke came out, and then the four of us got on an employee bus, and it brought us into the center of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The bus terminal?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, the buses didn’t go beyond the bus terminal. But no, I never rode on the cattle car, although a friend of mine got into the lab by flashing a Lucky Strike package for his badge.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, and got away with it.
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, yeah, there was a lot of craziness like that that went on. Well, would you agree that the Oak Ridge wartime experience and early experience after the war was an unusual community in which to live?
Mrs. Lyon: I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Mr. Kolb: Why not?
Mrs. Lyon: Because of the people I got to know.
Mr. Kolb: The people were the main element there?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. I got to know – I guess I have to say this – I got to know Jews. I was raised without Jews, never did know them. I knew a few at Chicago.
Mr. Kolb: Right, or black people. In Michigan, you didn’t have much black exposure.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right. I didn’t get to know black people until much later. But I did get to know Jews because they were the ones that brought their brains to the nuclear science, and their families. And they are my best friends.
Mr. Kolb: Still are, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I couldn’t live in a community that was not largely Jewish.
Mr. Kolb: Or had a Jewish element, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Recently I was – [refers to tape recorder] this is off.
Mr. Kolb: No, no.
Mrs. Lyon: Recently I was –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, do you want it off?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, not necessarily. It occurred to me that maybe I would be smart to sell the house and move to a community, a retirement community. And there is a very good one over in Crossville. It’s a group of activists in the Pleasant Hill Retirement Community. And I went over and looked and I put down a deposit and I chose a house that I could afford and started making arrangements to sell our house, put this house on the market. But while I was being shown around Pleasant Hill Community �� do you have to leave?
Mr. Kolb: No, no, just looking at my watch. No, I’m fine.
Mrs. Lyon: While I was being shown around Pleasant Hill Community by a woman, Nancy somebody, I said, “Are there any black people in the community?” And she said, “Well, we did have a black couple, but one of them died, but the other one is still here.” And I said, “Do you have any Jews?” “No,” she said, “except my husband.” And that gave me pause. I didn’t know whether I wanted to live in a community that didn’t have Jews. I’m just spoiled for that high type of intellect. And fortunately, after my house had a sign out in front, saying “For Sale,” my phone started to ring, and people I hardly knew, people whose husbands I had worked with at the lab said, “You aren’t leaving Oak Ridge, are you? You can’t leave Oak Ridge.��� And they convinced me, so I took my house off the market. But before I had, it had been sold, I mean, we had a buyer.
Mr. Kolb: You could have sold it.
Mrs. Lyon: Could have sold it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, came that close.
Mrs. Lyon: So now I have a reverse mortgage.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good. Well, as a dedicated Oak Ridger, you’re being consistent, that’s all I can say.
Mrs. Lyon: I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: You’re stuck.
Mrs. Lyon: I’ll die here.
Mr. Kolb: You’re stuck, Barbara.
Mrs. Lyon: With a little bit of luck, I’ll die in this house.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. That’s what a lot of people say. It’s the people, you know, it’s all this international exposure, not just U.S., but it’s international, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, and it spoils you. I used to visit other towns that were, that were educated, sophisticated –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, university type towns.
Mrs. Lyon: And the conversation at parties was just altogether different from anything we had here. It was retail oriented.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. “What are we spending now?” Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: “The family is fine,” you know, but yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: I just wouldn’t be happy in another place.
Mr. Kolb: You get spoiled. You get expecting it and you don’t realize what’s here until you miss it, and then you don’t have it. Well, that’s a very good way to wrap up, I agree. Thank you, thank you Barbara, that was a wonderful interview.
Mrs. Lyon: Thank you, Jim.
Mr. Kolb: Thank you.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF BARBARA LYON
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
July 22, 2004
[Side A]
[Editor’s note: Recording begins mid-conversation.]
Mrs. Lyon: I was pregnant, and I was expecting a baby in the next month or two, and I didn’t know how you had a baby without a phone or a car. But then I was walking around the house and I found a phone pole down by the road that had a red box on it that said Emergency, and I opened the box and there was a phone, so I thought that’s what we’ll do. What I didn’t take into account was the neighbors. Neighbors were your society then. Without cars, you couldn’t do anything.
Mr. Kolb: You had a network.
Mrs. Lyon: Except, yeah, except the neighborhood, and we had many street parties.
Mr. Kolb: Who were your first neighbors?
Mrs. Lyon: Our first neighbors were the Templetons. He was an engineer, and I don’t know what it was he did. As soon as the war was over, he moved to a franchise in Texas.
Mr. Kolb: Well you weren’t supposed to know what people did, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Well that’s true, that’s true. And his wife was Ruby May, and she was a Memphis belle, and we always thought of her as ‘Ruby May, the Memphis Belle.’ Shortly after I got home from the hospital with the new baby, Ruby May came running over and said, come quick, Ken is stuck in the mud. Ken was my son, two years old. I ran over. I was still kind of rocky. I was about, I was about ten days out of parturition, and there was a great arroyo between her house and the house beyond, which had been washed out by a flash flood, tree roots and rocks were all along the side of it, and way down at the bottom was this little boy, standing there with both of his feet disappeared.
Mr. Kolb: In the mud.
Mrs. Lyon: In the mud.
Mr. Kolb: Having fun.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, he was wondering what to do. He was standing there kind of puzzled. Fortunately, he didn’t panic. If he’d panicked and fallen on his face, he probably would have disappeared.
Mr. Kolb: Now, he was only two years old?
Mrs. Lyon: Two. He was two. And so, how he got out of the house, I don’t know that. I should have known. But I walked, I got down to the bottom of the arroyo, holding onto the rocks and roots and grabbed him by the waist and dug down to get his feet out of the mud, and we sacrificed one shoe, and Ruby May stood at the edge and said, “I just hate mud!” Well, we all did.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that was just one of many muddy experiences.
Mrs. Lyon: The other hardship of early life there was the famine.
Mr. Kolb: Famine?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, we had, we were on rationing, of course, but in addition to the rationing, there were shortages. We couldn’t spend our stamps. There was no meat. The retailers, who were called ‘concessionaires’ at that time, did not know how much stock to order, because the population of the town was a secret. The Army, of course, had everything, and in the hospital I had meat three times a day, but we had meat once a week if we were lucky after I got out, and we used to go on meat forages outside the reservation.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, to the farmers, you mean?
Mrs. Lyon: To farmers, yeah, people who might be able to sell us meat, eggs. We had milk delivered to the porch, but you had to stand in line. You had to get on a list to get to Norris Dairy, because they had Jersey cows, and they had more cream in the milk.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, yeah, richer, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s one thing, you saw the cream on the top, not separated –
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, yes, that’s right, and that was our source of cream. There were times when I had not one gram of fat in the house, not any kind of fat at all, and I experienced, what I have read about since, which is fat hunger. Apparently if you go a long time without any fat at all, you can’t think of anything else.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness. We don’t have that problem anymore. That’s the opposite problem, the opposite problem [laughter].
Mrs. Lyon: So, let’s see, what else?
Mr. Kolb: So you were used to standing in line, of course, for whatever.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, cigarettes were hard to find. I had a stroller that I had brought from Chicago that was all wood, because we couldn’t use anything metal. Everything metal was turned in. And it had wooden wheels, and we had boardwalks instead of sidewalks. And the boardwalks went through the forest in the back of the house. And the way to get downtown was to take a boardwalk, and I could take it to Cedar Hill and catch a bus, but not with the stroller. So if I went downtown – this was before Rick was born – if I went downtown with Ken, I had to walk all the way with the stroller.
Mr. Kolb: Now, did that work on the boardwalk, the stroller?
Mrs. Lyon: Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, they were wooden wheels, no springs, wooden wheels, solid wood wheels.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, wooden wheels on a wooden boardwalk.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s a rough ride.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, well, Ken enjoyed it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, I guess so. I’m glad he did.
Mrs. Lyon: But –
Mr. Kolb: Now, how long – you say you didn’t have a car.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, we didn’t have a car until, let’s see, Rick was born in ’45, the war was over that fall –
Mr. Kolb: Right, August.
Mrs. Lyon: And Rick was, I think, two before we got a car. We got a second-hand car.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so Dick had to take the bus to work?
Mrs. Lyon: At first, the bus came straight to the house and picked him up at the house. Then later, he was let off at Cedar Hill by a bus, and he walked up from there. And as long as he was taking the bus, it was great, because he was home at five o’clock, and I knew when he would be coming in.
Mr. Kolb: Let me ask, just to diverge a little bit, what was his job down here? Did he work at the Graphite Reactor by chance?
Mrs. Lyon: He had a loop, a NaK loop.
Mr. Kolb: A NaK loop.
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn, sodium potassium loop. They had a fireman sitting outside his lab all the time. He was – I don’t know, what do you do with a loop?
Mr. Kolb: Well, was it an irradiation experiment?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: So it was at the Graphite Reactor, had to have been.
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe so.
Mr. Kolb: That’s the only reactor we have there.
Mrs. Lyon: I never went to work with him.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it had to have been there.
Mrs. Lyon: And he never said “Graphite Reactor” to me.
Mr. Kolb: Probably, probably working on an irradiation experiment with some metal, something of that nature.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: With NaK, because that became a big research project later on.
Mrs. Lyon: It did?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and he was an expert on NaK technology, yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: He edited the Liquid Metals Handbook.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, I mean, he was a liquid metals person all his life. It was his field, yeah. I didn’t know he started that early, or even that that program started that early, because that’s pretty early. ’45 is pretty early.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I believe he was a group leader.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, so he worked at X-10.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, always worked at X-10.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right. Okay, I’m sorry, but anyway, back to the living conditions. The muddy streets were a mess. Of course, you had to deal with not having a car, and all the rationing, so did you shop much outside of Oak Ridge besides these farms? Did you go into Knoxville and Clinton?
Mrs. Lyon: We weren’t making a great deal of money.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have much to spend.
Mrs. Lyon: In addition to the rationing – well, Stoke’s father, who knew –
Mr. Kolb: Whose father?
Mrs. Lyon: Dick’s father, who knew Arthur Holly Compton, also knew Oscar Mayer. Stoke’s – Dick’s father was Chief Executive Officer of the Association of Commerce in Chicago, and as such, he knew a lot of leaders in Chicago, and one of them was Oscar Mayer, and Oscar Mayer-
Mr. Kolb: Of the meat?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, Oscar himself, and when Dick’s father told him that we were in Tennessee without any meat, he said, “Well, are they using up their stamps?” And he said, “I don’t think so.” We threw away red stamps. Well, he said, “Tell them to send me all of their red stamps, and I’ll send them the meat.” So once a month, we got an Oscar Mayer delivery of a pound of wieners, a link of liver sausage – this really isn’t interesting, because it isn’t typical of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: It’s wonderful, because it is so atypical. That’s what’s great about it, I mean, what you do to survive.
Mrs. Lyon: And a pound of bacon, and a nugget of boneless ham.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. And how long did that go on? Till after the war?
Mrs. Lyon: Until rationing stopped.
Mr. Kolb: And when was that? I’ve forgotten.
Mrs. Lyon: That was the end of the war.
Mr. Kolb: I guess that was the end of the war. I experienced that too.
Mrs. Lyon: We didn’t want rationing to stop, because we felt that it would mean that there would be no limit to costs. But it stopped, and there was an inflation. But eventually our salaries adjusted.
Mr. Kolb: Did your special treatment of this meat delivery cause any problem with your neighbors or did – people that knew you?
Mrs. Lyon: I shared it with them.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I was going to say, because they had the same problem you did. They were short of meat.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, that’s right, that’s right. I had a way of making –
Mr. Kolb: You could have a meat party every once in a while, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I used to get a loaf of rye bread, and I would take a piece of bacon, one piece of bacon and cut it in half, and I would put cheese between the two pieces of bread, and I would put the bacon on the outside, and I would fry it, and it made a very nice bacon cheese sandwich.
Mr. Kolb: Talk about stretching the bacon, half a piece.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, oh, yeah, we would often have just one piece of bacon.
Mr. Kolb: Just the essence of bacon.
Mrs. Lyon: I knew how to make a whole casserole with one strip of bacon. But one time during a very hot summer, the package arrived, and I took it out to my U-shaped kitchen, and opened it up eagerly, and it was filled with maggots.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no. Oh, goodness, it sat too long in some post office, was ruined.
Mrs. Lyon: And the problem was that it was between me and the living room. It took a lot of courage to even walk past that. [laughter]
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I guess so, ooh. [laughter]
Mrs. Lyon: Well, anyway.
Mr. Kolb: That only happened one time? That the meat spoiled?
Mrs. Lyon: Just once.
Mr. Kolb: I guess there was no such thing as, well, expedited delivery back then.
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: With wartime, everything else took precedence. Well, that’s a unique story. I’ve never heard that before, and I never knew about fat deprivation.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, fat deprivation is –
Mr. Kolb: I mean, we just don’t have that problem anymore, haven’t had that in a long time.
Mrs. Lyon: – really serious. They learned about it in Germany after WWI.
Mr. Kolb: Physically, what did it cause you? Could you not sleep at night?
Mrs. Lyon: You just couldn’t think of anything else.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it kind of made you distracted.
Mrs. Lyon: It was just the hunger.
Mr. Kolb: Your body just was not normal.
Mrs. Lyon: Nothing tasted good.
Mr. Kolb: That’s so far from our present experience that we don’t even think about it.
Mrs. Lyon: I know it, I know it.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve never heard that.
Mrs. Lyon: I’ve had such an interesting life.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I bet you have. That’s what we’re going to talk about.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I mean, I started out in the twenties – well, you don’t want to hear this.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, go back. That’s fine, go ahead.
Mrs. Lyon: In the twenties –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, you were from Michigan, right?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, my father owned a newspaper, and we were prosperous in the twenties. We had a chauffeur, we had a maid, we had a cleaning woman, and then the Depression came and somehow or other, I felt that it was my fault.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no, for goodness sakes.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I got called on so many times for wasting money, buying something that cost too much or something.
Mr. Kolb: Well, was this as a teenager?
Mrs. Lyon: By my parents. I was born in ’18, so I was twelve in ’30, and so I went through the Depression in my teens, and I got reamed out for buying things, so I thought, well this is why we’re poor, because –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness, ruining the country.
Mrs. Lyon: Then I went away to college and then I lived through the War and then I lived through the nuclear science era and the Cold War. It’s just been a very good life, very exciting.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve heard other Oak Ridgers – well, the fact that you were in Oak Ridge made it even more unique than just the fact – I mean, everyone was going through the same thing, but being in Oak Ridge made it, I don’t know, what’s the magnification factor, times three, or – in terms of interest?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s true, because the people in Oak Ridge are –
Mr. Kolb: The Oak Ridge experience was unique, right?
Mrs. Lyon: – are the kind of people you can’t live without. And you go to try another town – over and over people left Oak Ridge after the War and came back because the towns were so uninteresting.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I never have heard that.
Mrs. Lyon: Stoke said that working with nuclear was intoxicating, and you just couldn’t live without it once you’ve tried it. Everything else was dull. His boss, Winter, Charlie Winter, left to go back to, was it Oklahoma or Texas, anyway he was into oil.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he was with Union Carbide, he was high up in Union Carbide.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and he went back to work with oil, and it was no good. He came back here.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I worked on the HRT, and he would come over while we were operating the HRT, and he had to see what was going on.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In fact they even kidded about making a special control panel that was not real so he could fiddle some knobs, and deal with something, so that he wouldn’t come up and do something on the control panel that would mess up the reactor operation.
Mrs. Lyon: How funny, how funny.
Mr. Kolb: because he wanted to come in and do something –
Mrs. Lyon: I know.
Mr. Kolb: – with his hands, you know. What does this do, and what is this doing? We never did it, but we made a joke about it.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, well that was, that was Dick’s boss.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that, I never heard anyone say what you said about your husband’s experience, but nuclear energy research was really exciting. It was. There’s no doubt about it.
Mrs. Lyon: “We were spoiled,” he said, “Once you’d worked with it, everything else was dull.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, let me ask you this then, because there’s a follow under that: when nuclear, in the seventies or eighties, got into trouble in terms of being accepted – nuclear energy, not atomic bombs, but nuclear energy – how did he react to that? I mean, somebody that’s dedicated their life to one field, and that’s nuclear energy, and to have it not accepted, how did he deal with that?
Mrs. Lyon: He didn’t take it personally. His reaction was that of so many people at the laboratory, E. P. Epler, Alvin Weinberg, all the old nukes, knew that it offered a solution to problems that the world would be facing in the future, and that attention to it should be continued. Myron Cherry was the lawyer, you know, who – I don’t know – a lot of people had to go and testify in court, and they came back almost broken because they had been slapped around by lawyers, and Myron Cherry was the chief one. The difference, of course, was the question would be, “Are you sure that this is no problem?” And no scientist will say he is sure, you know. They were looking for the truth, and the lawyers were looking to win.
Mr. Kolb: Looking for an excuse.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, they were –
Mr. Kolb: Well, I’m sorry.
Mrs. Lyon: I can’t think of the word. They were promoting it, promoting their side.
Mr. Kolb: Right, now was this hearings about power plant licensing?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, licensing, and there was the famous cow at the fence around the nuclear reactor.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, hypothetical dose. Yeah, right. How much irradiation would it get after a major accident, yeah, if you drink its milk, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, because I was involved in that too. But in other words, he handled it assuming that eventually nuclear power would come back.
Mrs. Lyon: He knew it would.
Mr. Kolb: So he was optimistic.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well, that’s good. But it was tough.
Mrs. Lyon: Frederick said he came back from testifying at one of these hearings, and he said after the lawyer was through with him, he really thought he was going to have a heart attack.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he was so upset?
Mrs. Lyon: The stress was so awful.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, yeah, I’m going to stop a minute.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, about living conditions, there’s another kind of interesting event that, or situation, the fact that this was a dry county, and you could not get liquor legally. Of course, you could get it illegally. How did that affect you? I mean, do you have any involvement, any remembrances about that?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, whenever we went north or to Chattanooga, we picked up what we needed, until it became legal here, and then we, when we came back from the north, we bought bread, because you couldn’t get good bread in the south.
Mr. Kolb: I see. But how did you get it past the guards in the wartime? Did you smuggle it in?
Mrs. Lyon: We didn’t have liquor during the wartime. I don’t know what we did for liquor. There was apparently some kind of deal in Kentucky with a brewery, and we used to get two-point-three beer.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, cheap beer, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, something-Falls.
Mr. Kolb: Well, as I understand it, there was liquor available.
Mrs. Lyon: There was, and I’m trying to think how we got it. I think we smuggled it in probably.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a lot of people did.
Mrs. Lyon: There is the famous story about the people who came in and had their liquor confiscated and later were invited to a party at the Nichols’ and found their own liquor on the sideboard.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, didn’t throw it away in other words.
Mrs. Lyon: Certainly not, certainly not.
Mr. Kolb: They kept it. Yeah, when there was parties for important people, they had liquor.
Mrs. Lyon: And friendships were made and broken by trips to Chattanooga and Oakdale, if you didn’t ask a friend to go with you.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness, you said ‘broken.’
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, or tell them that you were going so you could bring back something for them. There was a lot of bitterness about that.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: What did you say about Mr. Weinberg once?
Mrs. Lyon: Mr. Weinberg got off the plane, from coming down from Washington, and a man who was meeting him said, “Mr. Weinberg, your briefcase is leaking.”
Mr. Kolb: Was it really?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, he took the briefcase for one purpose and one purpose only.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Well they had special briefcases back then, large, with padding.
Mrs. Lyon: Sure, and the central liquor store in Washington, if you went to it, they would say, “How is Mr. Weinberg?”
Mr. Kolb: One of their main customers, yeah, of course. So you went around, you got –
Mrs. Lyon: Cigarettes were a problem too, cigarettes, and then after the war was over, the tax on cigarettes was so heavy, we used to go to North Carolina and bring in cartons of cigarettes.
Mr. Kolb: At least that was legal; it wasn’t illegal.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, that’s right.
Mr. Kolb: It was expensive. But that takes us to the question of dealing with the locals. I assume you went shopping in Knoxville some. How were you treated by the locals?
Mrs. Lyon: The Knoxville police force was the enemy of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Really. Really!
Mrs. Lyon: A man was seized by the city police when he stumbled stepping off a curb. He was taken into custody for public drunkenness and held incommunicado. He could not make a phone call. Another time, a girl was going to college and belonged to the International Group there. The International Group had a party. The police raided it, found the girl dancing with somebody of a different race, put her in the car and quizzed her with sexual questions all night long. She was hysterical by the time they let go of her.
Mr. Kolb: Well, they didn’t arrest her, they just harassed her.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. The stories of the Knoxville police were just horrendous.
Mr. Kolb: I never have heard that before. So they singled out Oak Ridgers, kind of?
Mrs. Lyon: I stopped taking the News Sentinel because its columnists were so hostile about Oak Ridge and started taking the Chattanooga Times instead.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, well about the other retail people, I mean, when you went shopping, did they –
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, they didn’t mind, as long as we had money.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good money, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But I used to drive into Knoxville with the babies in the back seat, and they would fall asleep driving in, but the minute I hit the Knoxville city limits, the streets were not paved, and we’d go bump, bump, bump, and they’d wake up. They had no gutters, and their streets were not paved. Really, Oak Ridge made Knoxville. Oak Ridge and TVA.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, I’m thinking about your question there.
Mrs. Lyon: It was –
Mr. Kolb: Of course, they would say TVA, but yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: It was the asshole of the world.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s now on record, isn’t it?
Mr. Kolb: That’s right, that’s fine. We’ll put it in quotes.
Mrs. Lyon: I had a black woman who came to me when Rick was born, and she came every day on the bus, and she took care of me and took care of Rick, and she was the oldest of twelve children of a Civil War veteran. She didn’t know which side of the Civil War he fought on. She called it the “Silver War.” Well, she wasn’t comic; she was just a marvelous person. I learned so much from her in the way of patience. She had relatives who were in the graveyards up on Orchard Lane.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so she was a local person?
Mrs. Lyon: She had grown up in Clinton and had been trained by Mrs. Cross at the age of twelve, and she’d been in service since that age. And she used to bathe Rick in front of the oven. She’d turn on the oven, and she’d sit in a chair and –
Mr. Kolb: To keep him warm, you mean?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and bathe him. Well, the heat problem was pretty bad. Each cemesto was heated by a soft coal furnace, and if we didn’t bank it properly at night, the temperature was forty in the house the next morning when you got up, and you had to start a new fire with kindling, which you didn’t always have.
Mr. Kolb: So it was a cold morning.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and the furnace was in the furnace room, where there was the coal bin, and the coal bin was refilled regularly by men who parked out in front and carried it up on their backs and dumped it in the door.
Mr. Kolb: Dirty job.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, yeah, and it made the house dirty too.
Mr. Kolb: Soot, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, the ceilings were all streaked with soot. It was a housekeeping challenge.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll bet, yes, right, between that and the mud, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a good experience with this housekeeper person.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, but she told me a lot. The Crosses had a, the Crosses were the rich people in Clinton, and they had a summer house where Grove Center is now, and they bathed in the spring, which was down where the swimming pool is now. And the swimming pool was settled there because of the spring. And their house was turned into a veterans’ house. Remember that house, next to the theater?
Mr. Kolb: A veterans’ house? I didn’t remember that.
Mrs. Lyon: It was VFW.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in Grove Center.
Mrs. Lyon: In Grove Center, next to the theater.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, VFW, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: It was an old Victorian house. That was the Crosses’ summer home. And every summer, Casina – I said, “That’s an interesting name, Casina.”
Mr. Kolb: What was her last name?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, I can’t think, oh, why do I forget that? She was such an important part of our family.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that’s okay, just don’t worry about it.
Mrs. Lyon: Casina [McSwain] – I asked her, and she said, “My daddy read books.”
Mr. Kolb: Which was probably pretty rare.
Mrs. Lyon: He was much, much older than her mother. And I think her mother was his second wife.
Mr. Kolb: So she was an intelligent person, this Casina, right?
Mrs. Lyon: She was not educated, but she knew a great deal.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, and her parents were above average, you might say, intellectually, you think?
Mrs. Lyon: No, her father was.
Mr. Kolb: Her father, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: Her mother wasn’t. She had a daughter who was retarded, I think, and I was able to steer her onto social security assistance for her daughter. Her daughter was old enough to work, but she couldn’t work, so she got some assistance there.
Mr. Kolb: How long did she work for you, do you remember?
Mrs. Lyon: Till she died.
Mr. Kolb: Till she died! That was quite a while, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: She died in ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, she worked all that time? She started during the war years?
Mrs. Lyon: ’69, ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s over twenty years, right? Wow.
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe it was. Let’s see, when did Marge Weinberg die?
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know.
Mrs. Lyon: I think that was ’69.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it sounds about right, yeah. So you had a good relationship, a long relationship with this woman.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. She was very dear to all of us. As a matter of fact, recently when Rick’s wife became pregnant, he said, “If it’s a girl, we’re going to call her Casina.”
Mr. Kolb: Good. I’ll be darned. Well, that, I mean, that was a rare –
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I felt enriched by her.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that���s interesting, yeah. There weren’t a lot of Afro-Americans here at the time.
Mrs. Lyon: No, there weren’t, it was not –
Mr. Kolb: As I understand it. Now some were brought in, of course, to work.
Mrs. Lyon: She was on the list of the hospital, social office, social services office, for taking care of women who were taking a baby home, and that was how I got her at first.
Mr. Kolb: I see, so you were fortunate, then.
Mrs. Lyon: We’ve used up the tape, haven’t we.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, it’s okay. I’m just looking. Well that’s another unique experience that you’ve had. There are other people that have had that kind of interaction, but not with this quality of a person.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, well that’s a very wonderful relationship you’ve described there. Let’s go on, unless you want to say anything more about that.
Mrs. Lyon: I can’t remember much more.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, did you have any other interaction with black people?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, yes, of course we had a black councilman.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, and that was – I forget his name. I should know it.
Mrs. Lyon: I forget it too.
Mr. Kolb: He’s passed away now.
Mrs. Lyon: I was, I was very –
Mr. Kolb: But this was after the war.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. You want the war. No, I found that I got much better service at stores – I learned to talk Tennessee.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, put a twang on your voice, huhn?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. The woman who lived across the street from me was a local person and she was very sweet. One time, Marge Weinberg was over at my house and I got to talking to Mrs. Carpenter, and Marge said, “Where’d you get the southern accent?” I hadn’t even realized I was doing that.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. So it got to be second nature to you kind of?
Mrs. Lyon: No, it’s just that I – I just guess I echoed their accent.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, you know Cas Walker had that trait. He could speak the most common, you know, vernacular, and he could speak the King’s English.
Mrs. Lyon: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Yes, that’s right. I’ve actually experienced that.
Mrs. Lyon: He wasn’t the good old boy.
Mr. Kolb: Well, he was both. He turned it on and off as the situation –
Mrs. Lyon: Do you remember Bert Vincent? Bert Vincent, the columnist, in the News Sentinel?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I do, now you mention it, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, we were taking the News Sentinel when we first came here, and I read Bert Vincent, and I just could not believe him. I used to cut out his column and send it to my friends up north. First thing I heard him say was, the story is that on New Year’s Day, you should eat field peas –
Mr. Kolb: Black eyed peas.
Mrs. Lyon: – and sow belly.
Mr. Kolb: And hog jaw.
Mrs. Lyon: Sow belly and field peas. Well, I knew what sow belly was, because I had seen it, live, and I knew what road apples were, but I didn’t know what field peas were. And he said, if you don’t, they say your head will beal.
Mr. Kolb: Will what?
Mrs. Lyon: B-E-A-L.
Mr. Kolb: Beal, that’s a new one. What does that mean?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, the thought of eating them made my head beal, and the thought of eating them with a hangover was just incredible. It was just a whole new world to me. I couldn’t wait to share that one.
Mr. Kolb: Did you ever figure out what ‘beal’ means?
Mrs. Lyon: No, I don’t know. And another thing he said was, a friend of his let his chickens roost on the foot of his bed. He said, “I didn’t ask him which way they faced.”
Mr. Kolb: Good, we don’t want to know. Oh, Lord. Well, more interesting things. Let’s move on. I’m going to turn the tape over right now.
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Barbara, let’s talk a little bit about early Oak Ridge’s entertainment situation in the wartime days. I’m sure you were involved in some kind of entertainment that was going on.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, of course, up to my ears. The Army provided something called Art – Sports and Recreation, I think it was called.
Mr. Kolb: The Army did this?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, Roane Anderson did, and they had a chess club and they had a bridge club, and it was all down there on Broadway in Jackson Square, across from the Guest House. But also, there was a lot of participatory arts. There were a lot of people who played musical instruments, and Waldo Cohn got them all together, and we eventually had a symphony orchestra that we went to hear. There was an Art Center that the people started up, there was the Playhouse that Marshall Lockhart and her friends started up, and we all contributed to it. We all went down and offered our services and it was all voluntary, and that was our social life.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a favorite among those?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I never was able to play a musical instrument well enough to be in that group, and I was not artistic, but I did get involved with the Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: Did you write, involved with writing some of the plays with, at some point in time, but way back there?
Mrs. Lyon: No, that’s Marshall, she did that.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, and Betty Osborne, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: And Betty Osborne, yes. I was on the board and I was employed by the Playhouse for a while, in the box office.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were? Oh, okay, I didn’t know that.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and I was in some plays and I worked lights. I was involved heavily with the Playhouse.
Mr. Kolb: So the Playhouse was your thing.
Mrs. Lyon: That was my playground, and Stoke also was in it – Dick – was also in it.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked with Paul Ebert, I guess, a lot.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: When did he come to Oak Ridge? Was it after the war?
Mrs. Lyon: It was after the war. I guess it was about 1950.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, because he was here when I came in ’54. Okay, so there was a lot of – and those were unique organizations for a town like, you know.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, but before we had a car, we had street parties. There were a lot of neighborhoods where people knew each other. Dottie probably told you about that. She lived off Kentucky.
Mr. Kolb: What were the occasions for these parties? Just Saturday night?
Mrs. Lyon: No occasion.
Mr. Kolb: Just Saturday night?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, sure. If we had some liquor, we’d have a party.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, all right, if somebody came back from D.C. with a load.
Mrs. Lyon: But Joe Miller and the Cohns and Dottie Silverman, and some other people all lived on, I think, Kelvin Lane. It was off Kentucky. And they would have a street party, and the whole street would – we’d pull a record player or a radio or something out – stereo out onto the street, and we’d dance. And it was great, and everybody brought food, and everybody brought what they had for liquor. That was our social life.
Mr. Kolb: Kind of spontaneous.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, and when I told you I didn’t know how to have a baby without a phone and a car – what you do is you call on your neighbors. By then we knew our neighbors. So when I was in labor with Rick, I just called Templeton next door, and he drove me down to the hospital.
Mr. Kolb: I’ll be darned. You were lucky to have a neighbor with a car.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: And he was home at the time. Came in very handy, at the very least. And I’m sure you made some very firm friendships with those parties.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, the friends that I made in Oak Ridge are treasures, just treasures.
Mr. Kolb: Even though people left, in some cases.
Mrs. Lyon: And they’re dying now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well that’s true, that’s right. Being married, you weren’t into the single dating situation like a lot of people were in Oak Ridge, but there was an awful lot of that going on, of course.
Mrs. Lyon: Many of the local girls who came and worked in the Y-12 cubicles, pushing buttons, not knowing what they were doing, came here because of the men, and ended up here because of the men.
Mr. Kolb: Right. Grady Whitman’s wife was one of those.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, Al Rom’s wife was one of those.
Mr. Kolb: There are a lot of them. And they did better than the engineers, because they didn’t fiddle around like some of the engineers would, but they said they found out. What about outside of Oak Ridge, like going to state parks and the Smokies, and that sort of thing? Did you do much of that? Of course, having a baby kind of tied you down.
Mrs. Lyon: Not in the early days, no. But I got to know the Smokies when I was working because I was in charge of a lot of the wives’ programs. But that was later on. I can’t remember going down to Gatlinburg much. Well, of course, we didn’t have a car, and we didn’t have time.
Mr. Kolb: Having two young children kind of became your focal point. Well, let’s move on then to talk about – what was it like living in this “Secret City,” where nobody was supposed to know what anybody else was doing, and keeping a secret? I don’t know whether you knew what Dick was doing or not, or why he was doing it – and living in a guarded town.
Mrs. Lyon: My husband was very conscientious about not revealing one iota about his work. I remember being with a group of women, and one of them said, “Well, everybody knows what they’re doing. It’s the uranium bomb with the cyclotron.” And Stoke came home, and I said, “This woman said this. What does that mean?” He said, “Who was it said it?” Within a week they were in Alaska.
Mr. Kolb: They were moved out?
Mrs. Lyon: They were moved to Alaska!
Mr. Kolb: Wow, that was quick.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s how clever they were at keeping the secret. And it really was a kept secret.
Mr. Kolb: So this was a wife that told this?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, a wife.
Mr. Kolb: And so her husband made the mistake of telling his wife, and then the wife passed it along.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: So he lost his job here.
Mrs. Lyon: And one of the people – that wasn’t here, that was in Chicago – and one of the categories that the security men were warned against was ‘bridge-playing women.’
Mr. Kolb: Who talk! [laughter]
Mrs. Lyon: I was not a ‘bridge-playing woman.’
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay. Did you know about the Army intelligence people being infiltrated in everything at the plants?
Mrs. Lyon: Not until after the war was over.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t realize that they were there?
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: But they were. I mean, you know about that, yeah, they were, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Apparently.
Mr. Kolb: They were snooping, in other words.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, no, I wasn’t aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: And they even snooped in town.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: But you didn’t know it, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: No, I wasn’t aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: But in terms of affecting your lifestyle or the way you felt about the town, having this guarded city, where the outsiders couldn’t come in, did you feel protected?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, in a way, it was a great advantage. You couldn’t be dropped in on by people, and there were no surprises. When they opened the gates –
Mr. Kolb: ���49. Were you for or against it then? Opening the gates. They had a referendum as I understand it.
Mrs. Lyon: I was active in the parents club, Cedar Hill Parents Club – this was before PTA – and we had a little project for the kids at the school to make posters telling them how to protect themselves against strangers coming into the – after the gates were open. And we posted them in all the halls of the school.
Mr. Kolb: But do you remember the vote about the opening of the gates, that there was a vote taken?
Mrs. Lyon: No, was there?
Mr. Kolb: It didn’t pass.
Mrs. Lyon: Is that right?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: I don’t remember that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s what I’ve been told, and they went ahead and did it anyway. It was a foregone conclusion that it was going to happen.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, we didn’t exactly live in a democracy.
Mr. Kolb: No, no, it was controlled. Obviously it was controlled by the federal government. But you felt protected, in other words, in your home.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yeah, felt very secure.
Mr. Kolb: Secure, yeah, and that was something that was going to go away.
Mrs. Lyon: Apparently.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, eventually.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. I remember us – we left home one time to go up to Michigan, and we not only left the house unlocked, but we left the front door open.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, oh goodness sakes, oh wow. Did you tell anybody you were going to be gone? I mean, your neighbors?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, I’ve never been security minded. Anyway, it didn’t bother me much. But I look back on it and think, what a foolish thing to do.
Mr. Kolb: But did you tell your neighbors you were going to be gone?
Mrs. Lyon: There were, there were three paradoxes that I observed when we first came here. One, because of the type of heat all of the houses had, there was a great deal of fog down on Tennessee, and up where we lived, on the hill, was quite sunny. And conversely, there were some times when there was fog on the hill and sunny down below. That was when the fog was lifting. So the first paradox I found were people driving with their cars with car lights on and dark glasses. Then another paradox was kids going to school in ankle socks and galoshes. That was the mud. And the other thing was Christmas wreaths on screen doors.
Mr. Kolb: On screen doors.
Mrs. Lyon: Because you never took your screen door off.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, those are three good ones. Kind of an oxymoron.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Didn’t always, you wouldn’t expect, you didn’t expect. Do you remember, going back to the opening of the gates, do you remember the day that that happened? The big celebration, the parade that occurred? Do you remember that parade?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes, and we had a newspaper then. That was the first of the Oak Ridger, and there was a story about it. Back in the early days, every fall we had a fire prevention parade that was participated in by all of the schools, and every school would have its own float. I remember one year that the theme was states of the union, and one school chose Idaho, and all the kids went around in grocery bags. They were potatoes.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, potato sacks?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah. No, they were grocery bags.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, grocery, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, they were little kids. And the parades always made me cry because there were the little kids and they were so cute. And then when we had the big parade celebrating the opening of the town, the paper said, “A parade is unique to Oak Ridge.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, really.
Mrs. Lyon: It was obviously written by strangers.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they didn’t know about the other parade.
Mrs. Lyon: They didn’t know that our only entertainment had been parades.
Mr. Kolb: But it was a good parade?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, Robert Mitchum, terrible looking guy, and somebody was called “The Body.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Marilyn “The Body,” not Monroe, but – and there were several other actors here.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t Alvin Barkley here too?
Mrs. Lyon: Maybe so. It was a tiresome parade.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yeah. We were used to little kids in sacks.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah? Yeah, and there was a big, big celebration, I guess, went on.
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: That was the opening. Well, another big event, the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb that exploded the secretness – where were you and how did your husband and you experience that?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, by then we had a phone and Stoke called me. Somebody told me to turn on the radio, and Stoke called me and said, “Have you heard?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve heard.” And he said, “What did they say?”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you heard it on the radio?
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn. And I said, “They said the town was vaporized.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, talking about Hiroshima.
Mrs. Lyon: And Stoke laughed. For him, I guess it was the achievement of what he’d been working for.
Mr. Kolb: Well, right, yeah, they were the enemy.
Mrs. Lyon: And I cried.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, he laughed and you cried. Yeah, that was an interesting reaction. Yeah. There’s nothing glamorous about war, is there.
Mrs. Lyon: And then, Franklin Roosevelt died.
Mr. Kolb: Before that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Before that, yeah. When he died I thought, if Truman becomes President –
Mr. Kolb: Which he would.
Mrs. Lyon: This means that Truman is President, and I felt that we were then going to be ruled by a green grocer. I just thought he was inadequate to the job. And look at him. Nixon turned him into a hero.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, well, you never know. How did the knowledge of the atomic bomb project – which you had no inkling of, right?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: I mean, how did this affect you, that we were involved in this tremendous –
Mrs. Lyon: Well, the end of the war –
Mr. Kolb: After the second bomb.
Mrs. Lyon: After the second bomb and the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission – and who was the Norris man who headed it?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, was it David Lilienthal?
Mrs. Lyon: Lilienthal. We all thought a great deal of him. We all thought highly of David Lilienthal. And many of my friends knew his wife; I didn’t. But we felt that it was in good hands. And then we found out that there was a danger of its being turned over to the military. And a large segment of Oak Ridge objected to that strenuously. And that was the first of our big political –
Mr. Kolb: Controversies.
Mrs. Lyon: Controversies and forces, and forces. We had the FANs and the FATs.
Mr. Kolb: The what? The FANs and the FATs?
Mrs. Lyon: The Federal Atomic Workers and the Federation of – what was the FANs? Anyway, both of them launched a great campaign to turn it over to civilian control, and they were successful in that. But that movement started here.
Mr. Kolb: Just in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Lyon: It may have been the whole nuclear community.
Mr. Kolb: Like Los Alamos?
Mrs. Lyon: We weren’t in touch with them, but it was very strong here.
Mr. Kolb: Being the biggest of the three cities, more people were here than Richland or Los Alamos. So, how big did that become? I mean, how many people are we talking about? Thousands or hundreds or what?
Mrs. Lyon: There were intense, intense groups that went to Washington and spoke to our representatives. Then after that, what’s his name – who was the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature? Norman Cousins. Norman Cousins came and talked to us. And he said that this would mark the beginning of a great arms race. And to prevent that, the only thing that would prevent that would be world federation. So up sprung, I don’t know, a dozen groups: Students for World Government, Teachers for World Government, Women for World Government, which I was active in and was the nucleus for the League of Women Voters.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, that’s how League of Women Voters started?
Mrs. Lyon: That was the nucleus group that became the League of Women Voters. At that time, we couldn’t have any registered, we couldn’t have any organizations that were national. We couldn’t have a PTA, for instance, we couldn’t have the League of Women Voters at that time. Something opened up.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, what time are we talking, this is just after the war, like ’46 or ’47?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Somewhere in there? Okay.
Mrs. Lyon: I guess it was just before incorporation.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, before incorporation, which was –
Mrs. Lyon: When was incorporation?
Mr. Kolb: Fifty, well, when you built your house, ’56, when the city was sold?
Mrs. Lyon: No.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, incorporation. I’m sorry, I don’t know.
Mrs. Lyon: When the town was incorporated.
Mr. Kolb: I don’t remember.
Mrs. Lyon: Before the town was incorporated, we couldn’t have any national organizations here.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see. So it was all locally, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But the movement for world government was intense, and that was in the ’50s.
Mr. Kolb: So this was before the UN was formed?
Mrs. Lyon: That was between ’45 and ’50.
Mr. Kolb: Was this before the UN was formed, then?
Mrs. Lyon: No, it was right after. And there was great hope that the UN would turn into a nucleus for world federation, but, of course, by then the Cold War had started and we got into the arms race.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, Norman Cousins was right. A lot of people were. So off we went. So you were very involved in that particular effort to try to – well, it wasn’t just civilian control – but, of course, the trouble is we didn’t have control over the arms race either. I mean, when the Russians got going, and –
Mrs. Lyon: The charter of the AEC mandated full disclosure of the nature of atomic energy, as it was called then, as wide a dissemination as possible. A speakers bureau was set up – Stoke was a member – and they went out to groups, there was a budget, and they were sent out to groups to talk about the nature of nuclear energy.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, nuclear power? Not the bomb technology, but nuclear power?
Mrs. Lyon: The science – nuclear science. The pros and the cons and the things to be looked out for and the possibilities. I don’t know how long that lasted. That was between ’45 and ’50. But the Cold War put a stop to full disclosure. And when I went to the laboratory, I was on a list – I mean, I was full disclosure – went to the lab in ’66.
Mr. Kolb: And you worked for the ORNL –
Mrs. Lyon: I worked for the Public Information Office.
Mr. Kolb: Review, right? Didn’t you work on The Review?
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, yes, The Review was dropped in my lap.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I remember that, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: But I was also doing press releases and I was being slapped down, right and left, for full disclosure. Apparently there was a very tight, tight –
Mr. Kolb: Control.
Mrs. Lyon: Control over information.
Mr. Kolb: So you didn’t have much autonomy locally.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, it was information control. So they were very glad when I left.
Mr. Kolb: Well, somebody had to try it, right? Somebody had to do it.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a career, eventually, at the lab, with that public information activity?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good memories out of that too.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh my, yes.
Mr. Kolb: So who else was out – who worked on The Review?
Mrs. Lyon: Sundberg.
Mr. Kolb: Sundberg, okay.
Mrs. Lyon: David Sundberg was brought down from the American Nuclear Society magazine to start The Review. And he found himself so busy with the Information Office that he just dropped it in my lap. And from then on, I had a ball.
Mr. Kolb: So you worked on that exclusively, as a review activity.
Mrs. Lyon: Not exclusively. Eventually I did. In my hands, it was a house organ, and that was its category. I had something in it for everybody at the laboratory, the hourlies, the weeklies, the scientific and technical staff, and Alvin wanted the purpose of it to be – the lab was so big, he wanted each division to know what the other divisions were doing so they could use each other.
Mr. Kolb: So a mechanism for them to reintegrate at the time?
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right. It was internal communication. So that was the aim that I pursued. It’s turned into a very sophisticated scientific magazine now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, definitely, right, a lot of effort.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: That’s amazing that that was the only way for them to interact very well.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: You’d think that the division directors would get together purposefully.
Mrs. Lyon: Well, they did, and there was a division directors’ luncheon every month. But this didn’t give them the full knowledge of what they were doing. The Physics Division learned about the Biochemical activities, and the Biologists learned about the Chemistry Division, and they didn’t have that kind of interaction.
Mr. Kolb: Right. I never thought about that being a problem. Although I can understand it. I mean, I always had a problem, or did for a while, with one of my supervisors, and I won’t mention his name, but he thought it was his job to keep us shielded from division news. That would be distractive, and here we were thirsty for what was going on up above, but he was a buffer and thought it was his job to keep us uninformed. You know the old saying, a management style of mushroom management?
Mrs. Lyon: Micromanagement, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Mushroom management.
Mrs. Lyon: Oh, mushroom.
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, we’re getting close to the end, Barbara, but let me ask: are there any other unique experiences about your early life in Oak Ridge? You’ve talked about a lot of them, but is there anything else you might want to add, just off the top of your head, so to speak, that might be of interest?
Mrs. Lyon: The buses.
Mr. Kolb: Ah, the bus system, there you go, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: The buses at first were very personal and came to your door, because nobody had transportation. Later on, they turned into a more normal bus service, but they stopped at a certain time of the day, nightfall or something, maybe ten o’clock at night. And Stoke and I took a bus down to visit some people, spend the evening with some people on California, where California is between Tennessee and the Turnpike. It was a long way off from 167 Outer Drive. We had a sitter. And when we left, we realized that we were leaving after the buses had stopped working, so we walked home.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, that’s a long way.
Mrs. Lyon: That walk was so memorable. It was a nice mild night. It rained on us a little bit, but at the time, we said, “We ought to do this more often.” We walked all the way up to Outer Drive, all the way along Outer Drive to our house.
Mr. Kolb: It was in the dark?
Mrs. Lyon: The sitter’s mother wouldn’t let her sit with us anymore.
Mr. Kolb: You got home so late.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, and there weren’t any street lights. It was in the dark. It was an extraordinary experience, and I’ll never forget it.
Mr. Kolb: Could have been kind of romantic, I guess.
Mrs. Lyon: It was, yeah. I guess it must have been three miles, four miles, all uphill.
Mr. Kolb: Well, it must have taken at least an hour, over an hour. The buses – did you ever ride on any of the cattle car buses, so-called?
Mrs. Lyon: Once. I went up to pick up my husband at work, and I took the two kids.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you could do that? You could take the children with you?
Mrs. Lyon: This was not during the war.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, afterwards, I see. But the bus system was still going on.
Mrs. Lyon: The cattle car buses were still going.
Mr. Kolb: So it wasn’t very long after the war.
Mrs. Lyon: The younger boy was walking, so it must have been ’50.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, they still had cattle cars going?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, maybe not. Anyway, the car broke down, and somebody gave us a ride up to the Lab, and we waited at the Lab till Stoke came out, and then the four of us got on an employee bus, and it brought us into the center of Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: The bus terminal?
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, the buses didn’t go beyond the bus terminal. But no, I never rode on the cattle car, although a friend of mine got into the lab by flashing a Lucky Strike package for his badge.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my, and got away with it.
Mrs. Lyon: Uh-huhn.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, yeah, there was a lot of craziness like that that went on. Well, would you agree that the Oak Ridge wartime experience and early experience after the war was an unusual community in which to live?
Mrs. Lyon: I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Mr. Kolb: Why not?
Mrs. Lyon: Because of the people I got to know.
Mr. Kolb: The people were the main element there?
Mrs. Lyon: Yes. I got to know – I guess I have to say this – I got to know Jews. I was raised without Jews, never did know them. I knew a few at Chicago.
Mr. Kolb: Right, or black people. In Michigan, you didn’t have much black exposure.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right. I didn’t get to know black people until much later. But I did get to know Jews because they were the ones that brought their brains to the nuclear science, and their families. And they are my best friends.
Mr. Kolb: Still are, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah, I couldn’t live in a community that was not largely Jewish.
Mr. Kolb: Or had a Jewish element, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Recently I was – [refers to tape recorder] this is off.
Mr. Kolb: No, no.
Mrs. Lyon: Recently I was –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, do you want it off?
Mrs. Lyon: Well, no, not necessarily. It occurred to me that maybe I would be smart to sell the house and move to a community, a retirement community. And there is a very good one over in Crossville. It’s a group of activists in the Pleasant Hill Retirement Community. And I went over and looked and I put down a deposit and I chose a house that I could afford and started making arrangements to sell our house, put this house on the market. But while I was being shown around Pleasant Hill Community �� do you have to leave?
Mr. Kolb: No, no, just looking at my watch. No, I’m fine.
Mrs. Lyon: While I was being shown around Pleasant Hill Community by a woman, Nancy somebody, I said, “Are there any black people in the community?” And she said, “Well, we did have a black couple, but one of them died, but the other one is still here.” And I said, “Do you have any Jews?” “No,” she said, “except my husband.” And that gave me pause. I didn’t know whether I wanted to live in a community that didn’t have Jews. I’m just spoiled for that high type of intellect. And fortunately, after my house had a sign out in front, saying “For Sale,” my phone started to ring, and people I hardly knew, people whose husbands I had worked with at the lab said, “You aren’t leaving Oak Ridge, are you? You can’t leave Oak Ridge.��� And they convinced me, so I took my house off the market. But before I had, it had been sold, I mean, we had a buyer.
Mr. Kolb: You could have sold it.
Mrs. Lyon: Could have sold it.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, came that close.
Mrs. Lyon: So now I have a reverse mortgage.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, good. Well, as a dedicated Oak Ridger, you’re being consistent, that’s all I can say.
Mrs. Lyon: I guess so.
Mr. Kolb: You’re stuck.
Mrs. Lyon: I’ll die here.
Mr. Kolb: You’re stuck, Barbara.
Mrs. Lyon: With a little bit of luck, I’ll die in this house.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. That’s what a lot of people say. It’s the people, you know, it’s all this international exposure, not just U.S., but it’s international, yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: That’s right, and it spoils you. I used to visit other towns that were, that were educated, sophisticated –
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, university type towns.
Mrs. Lyon: And the conversation at parties was just altogether different from anything we had here. It was retail oriented.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah. “What are we spending now?” Yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: “The family is fine,” you know, but yeah.
Mrs. Lyon: I just wouldn’t be happy in another place.
Mr. Kolb: You get spoiled. You get expecting it and you don’t realize what’s here until you miss it, and then you don’t have it. Well, that’s a very good way to wrap up, I agree. Thank you, thank you Barbara, that was a wonderful interview.
Mrs. Lyon: Thank you, Jim.
Mr. Kolb: Thank you.
[end of recording]